zed by the hands of thousands who desired and needed such
stimulation and help. The Dutch canon was not capable of rising to the
heights of Tauler and the Frankfort priest, who saw in the love of God
a good in itself transcending the happiness of one's own soul. He just
wanted to be saved and tried to love God for that purpose with all his
might. But this careful self-cultivation made his religion
self-centered; it was, compared even with the professions of the
Protestants and of the Jesuits, personal and unsocial.

Notwithstanding the profound differences between the Mystics and the
Reformers, it is possible to see that at least in one respect the two
movements were similar. It was exactly the same desire to get away
from the mechanical and formal in the church's scheme of salvation,
that animated both. Tauler and Luther {34} both deprecated good works
and sought justification in faith only. Important as this is, it is
possible to see why the mystics failed to produce a real revolt from
the church, and it is certain that they were far more than the
Reformers fundamentally, even typically Catholic. [Sidenote:
Mysticism] It is true that mysticism is at heart always one, neither
national nor confessional. But Catholicism offered so favorable a
field for this development that mysticism may be considered as the
efflorescence of Catholic piety _par excellence_. Hardly any other
expression of godliness as an individual, vital thing, was possible in
medieval Christendom. There is not a single idea in the fourteenth and
fifteenth century mysticism which cannot be read far earlier in
Augustine and Bernard, even in Aquinas and Scotus. It could never be
anything but a sporadic phenomenon because it was so intensely
individual. While it satisfied the spiritual needs of many, it could
never amalgamate with other forces of the time, either social or
intellectual. As a philosophy or a creed it led not so much to
solipsism as to a complete abnegation of the reason. Moreover it was
slightly morbid, liable to mistake giddiness of starved nerve and
emotion for a moment of vision and of union with God. How much more
truly than he knew did Ruysbroeck speak when he said that the soul,
turned inward, could see the divine light, just as the eyeball,
sufficiently pressed, could see the flashes of fire in the mind!

SECTION 5. PRE-REFORMERS

The men who, in later ages, claimed for their ancestors a Protestantism
older than